Glenwood

Opponents of a proposed gas station in Glenwood told the Howard County Board of Appeals last night that the facility would attract criminals and increase traffic at an already congested intersection.Glenwood LLC representatives are proposing a nine-pump Freestate station on 1.3 acres at Carrs Mill Road and Route 97. The station would be part of a 30,000-square-foot shopping center.About 25 opponents, many of whom live in communities less than a mile away from the proposed project, attended last night's meeting.

Anyone who wants to know something about Glenwood's history will no doubt end up in the same place -- a plain-looking white house with a 1789 desk and volumes of memories under short-cropped gray hair.William W. Pindell, 84, does not claim to purposefully gather the history for which people have come to depend on him."I never really collected it, I just remembered what people said. I have some stuff, if I could just find it."Included in that local treasure of historical "stuff" is a 1911 trader's license, framed and hardly yellowed on his living room wall.

PARENTS VEST an awful lot of trust in bus drivers, highway engineers and school administrators when sending off children on yellow buses. All of these workers are supposed to exercise great caution in getting children to and from school. Last Friday's accident that killed a school bus driver in Easton reminds us of the enormity of that responsibility.But the safest approach is not always so obvious. In western Howard County's Glenwood area, parents want lower traffic speed limits and flashing lights on busy Route 97. State transportation officials, meanwhile, say such safeguards could cause accidents rather than prevent them.

Western Howard County residents, once so far from a sizable library that some defected to Carroll County to check out books, now have a state-of-the-art facility with a cutting-edge extra -- a cafe. At the Glenwood branch library's grand opening last night, visitors admired the building's agriculture-themed architecture, ranging from a barn-like roof to "barns" in the children's section, and sampled coffee and cake from the cafe. Howard County officials believe the cafe -- part of a nationwide trend in libraries -- is a first for Maryland, although the Pikesville library has offered coffee and wrapped snacks at the information desk since February.

In a few years, west county residents may be able to experience one of the joys of living in Columbia -- having a neighborhood center.The unincorporated city has 14 of them, built and run by the nonprofit Columbia Association. The county operates one, the Roger Carter Neighborhood Center in Ellicott City, and a second is now being planned for Glenwood."There is nothing like this in the western part of the county," said Johanna Baldwin, 78, who has lived in Glenwood for 40 years and served on a committee to help plan the center.

A former Glenwood Middle School teacher accused of paying a 15-year-old boy to perform sex acts in March was indicted this week by a Baltimore County grand jury.Klaude Krannebitter, 36, was charged Monday with a third-degree sex offense, a fourth-degree sex offense, perverted practice, child pornography, possession of child pornography and lewdness.In another case involving the same boy, a Howard County grand jury indicted Krannebitter on May 6, charging him with contributing to the delinquency of a minor and engaging in an unnatural and perverted sex act.Krannebitter, who lives in Baltimore County, had been a health education teacher at Glenwood for 12 years and coached baseball, varsity basketball and junior varsity basketball at Glenelg High School until spring 1996.

Parent leaders at one of the state's top middle schools, Glenwood Middle in western Howard County, are charging that pupil "sabotage" triggered a sharp drop in the latest Maryland School Performance Assessment Program scores. A letter released yesterday by the Glenwood Middle School PTSA executive board said that the school's 13.8-point drop was directly related to pupil boycotts of the test last spring - disruptions that followed the firing of popular teacher Kristine Lockwood. The letter pointed to "a portion of the [eighth-grade]

READING IS more than just reading for Glenwood Middle School teacher Carol Nieberline. The reading teacher is on a mission to bring joy to kids who need it. On Valentine's Day, Nieberline took Glenwood's 280 seventh-graders to Harlem Park Elementary School in Baltimore for the day. They took along red and pink construction paper and other essential supplies for projects they and the Baltimore children would do together. "We had a great day," Nieberline said. The seventh-graders arrived about 10 a.m. and set off for different classes around Harlem Park.

For 10 years, trucks large and small trundled along western Howard County's country roads carrying thousands of pounds of Mexican marijuana to the region's green hills for distribution to central Maryland.Unknown to neighbors and law-enforcement authorities, local contractor Randolph Ayersman ran a wholesale drug ring out of his Dayton and Woodbine houses for a decade -- importing in all more than 3 tons of marijuana.Since the ring was discovered in 1994, Ayersman, his two brothers and five others in the cross-country ring have either pleaded guilty or been convicted of federal drug charges.